Realms of Strangers

The Maqamat of Hariri features an intellectual pursuing a trickster to collect his rare words, sophisticated compositions, and curious accounts. Writing against the grain of modernist and Orientalist readings, Essakouti argues that strangeness in both language and space is the key to this forgotten classic, which makes it worth reading also today. Only a stranger (gharib) who comes from a distant land can fulfill the audience's obsessive desire for curiosities, wondrous accounts, and exotic vocabulary (gharib), which always exists elsewhere.